Categories

Archives

Making Bizhub work with authentication in Linux

By Rytis, on March 15th, 2013

My university department just acquired a Konica Minolta Bizhub printer/scanner/copier and decided that authentication is needed for its daily usage. This created serious issues using it with Linux since default drivers weren’t able to function anymore. There is very little information about this on the Internet and I spent some time to get it to work by trying to combine what I found on the net and by lots of pure testing. I hope that the following is gonna work for someone who is facing a similar issue.

I am using Ubuntu Linux myself but this would probably work in any Linux distribution with some minor adjustments and provided that printing is done through CUPS. This page was really useful to get me started but I was forced to make some changes so as to make the printer work. I will explain here in details the steps I used, some of which are just taken from the referenced web page.

First step is to download official Konica Minolta drivers and utilities for your machine. In my case it was the driver KO423U.ppd (it was for Bizhub 223) and the printing utility for UNIX, namely kmpu1.8. There’s a deb file in kmpu which installs itself in /opt/ folder and also installs some necessary filters for printing into your system. Once you installed the utility, place the downloaded PPD file for your machine in /etc/lp/ppd/ folder. Also, you have to replace the default Konica Minolta filter by the one installed.

This finishes the installation of the necessary software and you can proceed. The next step is to set up the printer. When in kmpu directory, run the following commands

./kpappendprinter

./kpconfig -a

kpappendprinter command will ask you for 3 options: local print queue name (let’s shorten it by lpqn), IP address of the printer and the port. I don’t know if there’s any way to guess these, I got all of them from a functioning setup on a MacOS. Recall that you can access this info in a Mac by pointing your browser to http://localhost:631/printers and enabling CUPS web-based interface if needed. In my case, port option was empty which I was unable to specify in kpappendprinter command and had to modify manually /etc/cups/printer.conf so as to delete the print part from DeviceURI.

Using kpconfig command is pretty self-explanatory, just be sure to pick the PPD file you downloaded previously and aimed for your printer model. Once this is finished, restart the CUPS service. In Ubuntu, that would be

service cups restart

Normally, you should be ready for printing. Try launching

kp -z readme.txt

'-z' option allows to see the full lp command used to print the file which is gonna be useful later and will help to get things done a little faster. If your printer uses authentication, you’re gonna need to specify the necessary options such as the username, the password (or PIN) and the authentication server. Once again, I managed to get some of the information from a working MacOS installation and your login should be given to you by whoever set up the printer. In my case, the options were

You may also specify some additional printing options such as saving toner, double-sided printing, etc. That is up to you. Once you finish, a document should get printed and also a helpful lp command appears looking similar to

Afterwards, I got pretty frustrated since I still wasn’t able to print neither PS or PDF files. After some investigation, I realized that the option '-o T=ka' specifies ASCII filter to be used for printing and somehow I couldn’t manage to find how to change it using kp. But if you launch the lp command above without this filter option, you should be able to print PS files (e.g. test.ps).

My next step was to make printing work for PDF files and I am going to explain why that is useful very soon. In Ubuntu, I had to create two files. First, /etc/cups/mime.types containing the line

application/pdf pdf string(0,%PDF)

and /etc/cups/mime.convs containing the line

application/pdf application/postscript 33 pdftops

If these files already exist in your system, check that these lines are there and uncommented and it should be fine.

The reason why I wanted to make PDF printing work is because it’s my main printing need but also because I was unable to print from any application with GUI even with correctly specified lpoptions. So I thought that to circumvent this problem, I’ll just add a Generic CUPS-Pdf printer as a default one, print everything to a PDF in a way that I like it and then send the generated PDF file to the Konica Minolta printer. This is what I did and it actually works for me. Once you add a Virtual_PDF_Printer, anything you print from an application is stored in $HOME/PDF by default and from there you can launch an lp command which works. To make it more usable, I created a bash script which is to be placed in $HOME/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts (not to forget to make it executable) and containing, for example:

So now all you have to do is just print your documents as usual, then go to the PDF folder, select the generated file and launch the script through the right-click menu. It is not the most elegant way of doing things but it works. There is probably a way to monitor the PDF folder for any newly created documents and then passing automatically the lp command but for now, I am fine with what I have.

UPDATE: I noticed that CUPS-Pdf printer does not always generate PDF files correctly, that is some PDFs fail or take a long time to load. However, Print to file option works flawlessly and is available in probably most Gnome applications, therefore I suggest to use that one instead. There are also issues when dealing with large PDF files and it seems to jam the printer quite often. However, I noticed that these problems rarely happen when printing a single page. Therefore, if you also encounter these problems, I suggest installing pdftk and splitting up your PDF into multiple files with a single page each before printing. You may use the following Nautilus script:

9 comments to Making Bizhub work with authentication in Linux

It all gets relative when the alternative is a Windows virtual box! But I may say that after a month of printing the way I explained, I’m pretty satisfied. It may not be beautiful but it’s 100% enough for basic office needs.

Please help. I have the same Bizhub 223 and want it on Authentication. I cant see this options in printer drivers in Ubuntu 12.04 after I have install. How to you enter username and password on printer drivers?

Why not integrate these extra commands into the filter script? That’s how we do it: the users have to print one document from windows into a file with correct authentication settings.
Then we save the KMUSERNAME and -KEY lines into a file that is automatically prepended to the document by the filter script based on the printing user.

Please help. I have the same Bizhub 283 and want it on Authentication. I cant see this options in printer drivers in Ubuntu 12.04/14.04 after I have install. How to you enter username and password on printer drivers?